Here is my problem that I am trying to resolve. I am sending emails using msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail. I have user whose user name is their email id. I send email notifications to helpdesk with the user names in the email body. I put the user names in a html table and the helpdesk people look at the mail using outlook.

Since the user names are email the outlook automatically converts the user name to hyperlinks. I dont want the hyperlinks. I want it to display as regular text. I also want the email format to be HTML.

This isn't something you can control from your code. That is how Outlook displays the text. There is a user setting in Outlook disable that feature but it is somewhat difficult to get it to work correctly and you will find that turning that feature off is a huge annoyance for everything else.

Yeah that's a feature of Outlook, not something that has anything to do with the code you generate; it finds strings with an @ in them, and converts them to links to make things easier.if you are ok losing the copy/pasteability, you could do what web sites do to prevent the harvesting of email addresses: replace the @ symbol with an image;

Lowell--help us help you! If you post a question, make sure you include a CREATE TABLE... statement and INSERT INTO... statement into that table to give the volunteers here representative data. with your description of the problem, we can provide a tested, verifiable solution to your question! asking the question the right way gets you a tested answer the fastest way possible!

Mozilla Thunderbird, EditPlus and even Notepad++ as well as LOTS of other applciations all do the same thing when they encounter text that looks like an url or email, so it's hard to justify fiddling with the data just because someone doesn't like the behavior of that feature.

You'll probably end up just living with the issue.

Lowell--help us help you! If you post a question, make sure you include a CREATE TABLE... statement and INSERT INTO... statement into that table to give the volunteers here representative data. with your description of the problem, we can provide a tested, verifiable solution to your question! asking the question the right way gets you a tested answer the fastest way possible!